Scala Ad Caelum
by Shun Ren Dan
Summary: Eraqus never was good at chess. He just knew how to press the right buttons.


The seaside window that overlooked Scala Ad Caelum revealed little of the world's secrets. Those waited below the surface of the crystalline blue sea that hemmed in every scattered settlement, marble spire, and paper town. Over it all, a network of shambling cable cars ferried what remained of the populace to and fro, their faces just pinpricks from where Eraqus sat upon his cushioned seat.

He didn't remember ever seeing the world in its prime. He only knew it as a ghost, the not-yet-decrepit remains of a once glorious bastion for the forces of light. Staring out at it over the course of his last summer there, he didn't think any less of it. The world was still full of strength, still beautiful and full of surprises.

One was the way the gulls fanned out over the sea, chased by the shadows of the clouds to pluck food out of the mouths of any weary traveler. Eraqus laughed when he saw someone's ice cream get snatched up, leading Xehanort's gaze right to him.

"Watching the tourists again?"

His tanned hand dallied over a black knight on their chess board, deliberating upon a move Eraqus might not ever see. Xehanort was the quicker strategist, but Eraqus knew better than to watch his friend's moves. Feint after feint, trap after trap, Xehanort loved playing the metagame.

Eraqus shrugged, leaned up against the cushion at the window, and leveled his gaze on his friend's face. He always looked so distant. He hadn't always been from Scala Ad Caelum, and to him, the world wasn't all that interesting. His love for the sea was obvious, but the rest of it, the decadent marble and the creaky cable cars, they just weren't that engaging.

"Maybe," Eraqus admitted. "You make your move yet?"

"Almost. You've got me in a bind."

"You say that, but I can't think of a time I've ever beaten you."

"Give me a blindfold and you might have a chance," Xehanort mused.

"Can't I just tie your hands behind your back?"

"I'd cream you. I could still move the pieces with my teeth."

Eraqus laughed a high and bubbly laugh. Xehanort, across the board, froze. When Eraqus was done, he didn't notice the red in his friend's cheeks or the way his eyes clung to the board like a raft on a stormy sea. Together, they played the rest of their game out, moving the pieces back and forth in rhythm until the sun set over the immortal hills outside.

By then, the tourists were all gone, and the conversation couldn't stay focused on the game at hand. Little dashes and dots of it were sprinkled in every once in a while, but Eraqus didn't like playing Xehanort because he liked the game. At first, maybe; years after their first one, it came down to the simple pleasure of a conversation between equals and the way their perspectives clashed together like crashing clouds.

For the most part, they argued without really arguing.

"Yen Sid is not secretly evil," Eraqus laughed, moving one of his pawns too far forward. Xehanort snatched it up without a word, putting his knight in a key position. "You're just trying to distract me. So unfair."

"Well, he is secretly balding," Xehanort muttered, toying with the piece in his hands. "Same thing. Isn't it?"

"Say that when you're bald."

"I'll never be bald."

"Xehanort, you're the only sixteen year old I've ever seen with a widow's peak—"

Eraqus's pawn bounced off the side of his own head and he fell into another fit of laughter while scampering over to pick it up off of the floor. Inspecting it as he picked the piece up off of the ground, he couldn't help the smile that spread across his face like ink over a page.

"I'd still be better looking than you, even if I were bald," Xehanort decided.

"What? You're the smart one," Eraqus said, plopping his pawn down with his other fallen pieces and regarding the board from the side. "You don't get to be the handsome one too."

"I'm also the bad boy."

"You really aren't helping your case here."

"You'd better be good at dancing. You need a niche. Yen Sid and I won't hesitate to kick you out of our three man boy-band."

"Course you won't."

Eraqus put both arms to the table, inspecting the field for his next move. Elevation chess was a difficult game. It relied a lot on knowing how to handle different altitudes and how those altitudes could alter perspective. It wasn't the kind of game you could play sitting down… but Xehanort always knew how to see the things Eraqus couldn't, and so he never really saw the need to pace around in the same way.

He was a housecat, comfortable enough lounging on his side of the table where the cushions in the window were plentiful and the sunlight a bath. Now, cast by the starlight instead, he looked a little tired.

"You're both jealous of my moves anyway," Eraqus mumbled, moving one of his pawns across the board. This time, he kept its ambitions in check, not that it undid his earlier mistake.

Xehanort's hand immediately fell idle over the head of a rook, danced across the board to the knight he moved a turn ago, and then came to rest on a pawn. He tutted while he thought of what to do next, two fingers drumming away at the borders of his jaw. Eraqus watched him until he got caught staring, then deflected any questions with a wide smile and a look back down at the board.

"These are the moves you should be focused on. You're getting trounced this time."

"Oh, don't be so sure. The light always finds a way."

"You always say that."

"And I always win."

"You have literally never once won."

"Chess is about the long game," Eraqus explained, squatting beside the table. He could feel Xehanort's golden eyes on him like beacons. He hoped the blush on his cheeks wasn't so noticeable. "Lose a game here, pick up a few tricks there. You get experience, so that you can win the war and not just the battle. You might be beating me now, but one day, I'll figure you out."

"And by then the score will be, what? Ten thousand to one?"

"And the game after that'll make it ten thousand to two," Eraqus agreed. "It's a game of inches!"

Xehanort scoffed and reared back across his cushion fortress, resting his chin in his hands. He wasn't impressed by Eraqus's humor, but he never was. He was a hard guy to please. That was what made his opinions so valuable. Eraqus played with a few possible moves, weighing their outcomes before he strolled toward Xehanort's side of the board to get a view of things from his perspective.

The game looked all but won from his side. A few of Eraqus's pawns were trapped in the southwest corner of the board, and his power pieces were in the middle of a stalemate in the east. They were well cordoned off from each other, separated by a row of pure threat that he would've been a mad man to cross.

Moving over it would start a battle that he couldn't see the end to.

That wasn't a bad thing. If he couldn't see the end to it, maybe Xehanort couldn't either. Then again, he was always one step ahead. He was the kind of genius you saw once a generation, capable of great feats that only their master couldn't see. Even Yen Sid regarded him as a rival, and Yen Sid didn't really waste the time of day on anybody. Eraqus grew on him like a fungus, though. It was hard to ignore someone that you spent so much time with.

He wondered, absently, what Yen Sid would've done in his place. Would he have risked moving into the twilight zone? Or would he have shifted somewhere else, determined to win a battle Eraqus couldn't yet see?

It didn't matter. Eraqus took the risk like only he could, shifting a rook out of the stalemate and into the offending row.

"Bad idea," Xehanort mumbled, watching the rook dip out of sight.

He could no longer take it, but he knew how to break Eraqus's tightly controlled formation. He moved in and the two of them danced back and forth for a while, warring over a few tiles on the board while the hour grew late. Neither boy noticed when the trams outside stopped sailing over the sea, or when the cables stopped creaking.

Things were still just as stalemated when Eraqus knelt down beside Xehanort's half of the nook, examining the battlefield from his friend's perspective for what might've been the hundredth time.

"Hmm."

"Any great insights, oh wise master Eraqus?"

"I think I'm a goner," he muttered, so deathly serious that even Xehanort snickered.

"You've got moves left."

"Yeah, and they all bring me closer to the grave."

Eraqus rested his head on the edges of their table and groaned, pained by the eminent image of his own defeat.

"You can still win."

"What? How?"

Xehanort hemmed and hawed a second, hesitating over the decision he made to stand up. Gently, he took Eraqus by the shoulder and led him to his half of the board. There, he guided his friend's wrist toward the side of the board they'd been ignoring for the last half hour of contest and conversation. Once his fingers were wrapped around the head of a pawn, Xehanort pulled his fingers a way a bit too quick and brought them back down over his friend's shoulders.

He shut his eyes, as if he expected Eraqus to do the same. Instead, Eraqus took the opportunity to stare at him unimpeded until Xehanort peeked out of his left eye.

"What're you doing?"

"I don't know. What're you doing?"

"Close your eyes, you dolt."

"Rude. Ask nicely."

Xehanort scoffed.

"Do you wanna win, or not?"

"Hmm. Fair point. I'll close my eyes."

"Then do it."

"No way," Eraqus dismissed. "What if I close my eyes and you move all the pieces around?"

"Do you really think I need to cheat to beat you?"

"Nah, but you're kinda cute when you're mad."

Xehanort closed his eyes with what might've been a huff. Eraqus, pleased, did the same with far less drama. He wasn't ever sure what Xehanort thought of little teases like that, or if he ever wanted to return the rosy barbs that Eraqus threw his way. He still came to play every day, so maybe they didn't matter.

"Your eyes are closed," Xehanort announced through gritted teeth. "Can you see the board?"

"What? Course not."

"Then look harder."

"My eyes are closed. How can I…"

"Don't use your eyes."

"Then how am I supposed to look?"

"Focus on the feeling."

Eraqus tried, but all he could think about was the feeling of his friend's fingers, curled around his shoulder like hooks. He wondered what they might feel like against his face, how they might buzz across his skin.

It didn't take long for Xehanort to pick up on the fact that his best friend was a little out of focus. He tried to bring things back under control with a deep breath.

"My hands are on your shoulders. Feel them."

"That's, uh… I mean, yeah, I feel those."

"Feel beyond them. Do you feel me?"

Eraqus nodded.

"Good. See without seeing. See beyond me. See the board."

Inch by inch, little pinpricks of light broke through the dark. Eraqus saw them emerge behind his eyes like stars, fan out into flurries, and then coagulate into a broad outline of the world around them. He saw the pieces on his side of the board, their positions lit up by spotlights and cast into real color. His brow furrowed, Xehanort's fingers shifted on his shoulder, and then the image was gone.

When he exhaled, the surprise was real, so was the jubilation in his heart as he practically tackled Xehanort to the ground in an attempt to throw an arm around him.

"Woah, that was so cool! I saw the thing!"

"The thing—"

"The thing you were trying to show me! I saw the board!"

"That's just seeing the board, Eraqus," Xehanort surled, looking away as Eraqus pulled him in close. The younger boy needed to stand up on his tiptoes to keep an arm slung around his silver-haired friend's neck, but that didn't seem to bother him. "It's not even a game if you can't see the board."

"Sounds like we need to reset the win counter then," Eraqus teased. "Whattaya say we start this one over?"

"You're just saying that because you're losing."

"I just want a fair fight! Besides, you'll still win."

"You can still win this one."

"So I can, so I can."

"Are you going to let go of me any time soon?"

"What if I don't wanna?"

The smile on Eraqus's face was a mile wide. It almost made Xehanort feel a little bad when he went to shove him off — and it didn't help things when he came down on top of him a second later, pulled down by a set of gentle fingers that dug into his collar.

"Woah, rude," Eraqus breathed. "I'm taking your seat for that."

They wrestled across the floor, scrambling toward the nook. Xehanort didn't remember all the air falling out of his lungs; it must've happened breath by breath, each one stolen by the way Eraqus's hands shoved and pushed and pulled him as they fought across the tile.

"My seat isn't going to help you win."

"It might, you never know," Eraqus grunted, one hand on the seat cushion and the other holding Xehanort at bay over by the table's edge. "Don't you wanna try something new?"

Xehanort pushed Eraqus's hand out of the way, reached for his collar, and pulled him away from the seat so that he could try to sidle into position. They jockeyed that way for a minute, arms akimbo, pieces on the board totally scattered in the chaos.

They were both halfway up the seat when Eraqus tugged Xehanort closer, brushed his lips over the other boy's cheek, and then pushed him away so that he could clamber into position under the curtains. Outside, the sky bled indigo; inside, Xehanort's cheeks were undeniably red, and he looked stunned as his back pressed up against the table's edge. He rubbed the spot where Eraqus's lips met him, if only for a second, and glanced up like the sore loser he totally was.

Eraqus, on the other hand, looked about as smug as ever. When Xehanort realized he was staring, he looked away, casting his eyes to the board as if it were totally wrecked for any other reason than the one he knew it to be.

"Well," he coughed, clearing his throat.

"Maybe something new isn't so bad."

"New game then?"

Xehanort's eyes flickered toward the sea, where the stars furloughed out across the water. There were so many of them out there, full of potential, left to play. His fingers rolled over his wrist when he turned back to Eraqus, more bashful than he'd ever been but just as proud.

"New game."


End file.
